Geraldine Allen, Sarah Rodgers, Timothy Walker and Baluji Shrivastav in 1992 (Photo Roy Cuckow) |
Twenty seven years later the recording is now being issued on Divine Art's metier label. I recently met up with Sarah to find out more about The Roaring Whirl and how it came about, and what it is like to revisit a score from 27 years ago.
The Roaring Whirl is essentially a musical narrative, telling the story through music. The work went through some development and the final version for the Nottingham NOW Festival in 1992 was fully staged with costumes for the instrumentalists and a kathak dancer as well as the narrator. It was originally an East Midlands Arts commission, they wanted a work which crossed over with another culture. The clarinettist Geraldine Allen was in the project from the beginning and as it grew the instrumentalists were brought in including Baluji Shrivastav playing a range of Indian instruments and narrator Bhasker Patel (who is now well-known for his role in the TV series Emmerdale).
The recording was made as part of the preparations for the stage show, partly to help Baluji Shrivastav (who is blind) memorise his part but also to provide the kathak dancer with something to rehearse to. The intention was always to take the recording forward at some point, but Geraldine's accident put everything on hold.
Sarah has a long relationship with Stephen Sutton of Divine Art partly because, wearing one of her other hats, Sarah runs the on-line music marketplace www.tutti.co.uk and they have long sold Divine Art CDs. At some point, Stephen asked Sarah whether she had anything of her own music which might be issued on a CD. (Most composers have recordings squirrelled away which they hope might work as a disc if the situation is right.) She sent him an excerpt from the recording of A Roaring Whirl, and they decided to go ahead.
27 years ago was before computers were commonplace in music, and when I meet Sarah she produces a beautifully hand-written score (in her own hand) which was the master copy of the score used for the performance. Since the work was put on hold, there was never a reason to transfer it to computer.
Returning to The Roaring Whirl after a gap of 27 years brought mixed emotions to Sarah. Partly this was listening to clarinettist Geraldine Allen at the top of her game, wondering where Geraldine's career might have gone had it not been for the accident. There is also the risky business of a composer listening back to their old music, and thinking 'did I write that?', 'what was I thinking?' and sometimes 'that's rather good'. It could have been scary, going back to the work again but listening to The Roaring Whirl, Sarah found the work thrilling and that it really worked.
The work gives a number of ways in for people. It tells the Kim story, the relationship between Kim and the Lama which is essentially a journey, and about friendship. Sarah finds Kipling's book interesting because there is so little jingoism in it, it does not feel as Colonial as many of his other works. The Roaring Whirl is in seven sections, the titles of which come from the novel. Six of these sections are narratives, each an accompanied reading followed by a musical interpretation, and the central movement is purely instrumental.
Sarah's music very much combines Western classical music with Indian classical and Sarah found it a lovely project, giving her the luxury of investigating the conventions of Indian music. Each section uses a different raga (implying a musical scale) and tala (implying rhythm), and Sarah points out that the different ragas have different qualities which affect the way they should be used.
Sarah has always had an interest in the music of other cultures and did her undergraduate dissertation in Javanese and Balinese gamelan. After her first degree she did voluntary service in Sierra Leone, the curriculum at the school where she taught was very music based, so she encouraged the department to embrace indigenous music, and she got the students to bring in music from their country.
Baluji Shrivastav, Basker Patel, Geraldine Allen and Sarah Rodgers at the launch event for The Roaring Whirl, 18/9/2019 (Photo Impulse Music Consultants) |
She emphasises that in a piece like The Roaring Whirl she is not writing Indian music, but responding to aspects of it and the piece is very much about Sarah using different aspects of Indian music as starting points for her own music. As you cannot write like an indigenous composer, each of Sarah's cross-cultural works is pretty much stand-alone, about how the music of that particular culture impinged on her as a Western classical composer. But as she went along she gained more experience of being able to incorporate the character of other cultures into her music.
The main musical material in The Roaring Whirl is fully notated for all instruments (Western and Indian) but each part would have an improvised section which called for the musicians from the two traditions to respond to each other and very much allowed Baluji Shrivastav to flower.
Whilst Sarah would not be averse to the work being performed again, she realises that it would be a big undertaking and that more realistically the recording itself is more likely to get picked up and that it would respond well to some sort of audi-visual treatment.
Working with the music of other cultures, both in her cross-cultural projects and whilst doing Voluntary Service in Africa, has affected Sarah's own music she thinks. It has given a very strong sense of rhythm to her writing, and also meant that she is not afraid to produce musical surprises. Beyond that, she realises she would not be the same person without the experiences. "Everything you encounter and use, you don't chuck it away and it becomes part of the colouring of your musical voice."
Sarah Rodgers and Geraldine Allen today (Photo Denise Bradley/Eastern Daily Press) |
Studying at University of Nottingham, Sarah did a little composition but it was mainly restricted to work on different styles and techniques. But whilst working in Africa there was a limited amount of repertoire available so she created it for her students to perform. "Art comes out of necessity" She felt comfortable with writing music, and felt it contributed something; she felt she had something to say.
Returning to the UK she continued, and found that she enjoyed engaging with performers. She comments that having talented performers as friends is something all composers need to capitalise on; if they are good friends they will tell you what they think! In the UK she ran a theatre group in Waterloo and wrote all the incidental music. She regards herself as a crafts-person composer, writing music that needs to be engaging and needs to do the job. Having this strand to her work is important to Sarah, as well as having her own projects.
Sarah Rodgers: The Roaring Whirl - Baluji Shrivastav, Bhasker Patel, Geraldine Allen, Timothy Walker - Divine Art Records
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